I hate when apartment brokers list $1 rents on Craigslist so they will always show up in searches. The problem is worse in some neighborhoods than others (at least in NYC). In the Financial District, these misleading listings drown out the listings that show only actual rent amounts.

It looks like the brokers who do this often deal in fairly pricey apartments, so it seems silly, not to mention spammish, to try to grab the attention of people seeking cheap rents.

This morning I realized it's easy to avoid those listings: just set the minimum rent to $2 instead of leaving it blank. Sure, it's obvious now, but this wouldn't be the first time I was slow on the uptake.

Speaking of slow uptakes: when I first started searching for apartments on Craigslist, it took me a while to figure out why there is a minimum-rent field at all. Who wouldn't want to pay as little as possible?

One reason is that you might figure you get what you pay for, and you don't want your search results cluttered with the cheap stuff.

Another reason is so that you can omit listings you've already looked at. For example, if you don't like any of the apartments under $1000 and might consider bumping your budget up to $1100, you'd search on the range $1000-$1100, because you don't need to see the under-$1000 listings again. (I picked $1000 because it's a nice round number, not because it'd get more than a broom closet in NYC.)

And now I see a third reason: to avoid seeing the bogus $1 listings.